Gertrude Duby Blom (1901-1993)

Resistance Fighter

Gertrud Elisabeth Lörtscher, “Trudi” (1901, Switzerland-1993, Mexico) was the black sheep in the family of a protestant pastor in Bern’s Highlands. A legendary combatant of Nazism in Europe known as Gertrude Duby, rescued by Swiss authorities in 1940 from beeing sent to a detention centre, she arrived in Mexico with a visa given by President Lazaro Cardenas. While exploring the Lacandon rainforest in 1943 she met Danish archeologist Frans Blom, whom she married and created Na Bolom (House of the Jaguar), a Centre for Mayan studies and a living in museum in Chiapas since 1951. Trudi was a journalist, photographer, feminist, ethnologist, anthropologist and sociologist and had many lives and many faces. Ecologist pioneer since 1943, she masterminded the Mexican Presidential decree in 1972, which recognized the Lacandons’ ownership of the rainforest, the only tropical jungle in North America. An aggressive defender of nature in the world, the United Nations distinguished her in 1991 with the tittle “First Woman Ecologist in the Americas”.More than two decades later, the message of this Queen of the Jungle remains vital : it is not possible to help others if their habitat is destroyed.

The author, Kyra Núñez-Johnsson (1952) is a Mexican journalist and writer. Awarded the Mexican national prize “Medalla Rosario Castellanos” in 2012, she lived and worked in Switzerland from 1985 to 2014. She holds a Master in International Relations, HEI-University of Geneva 1997, and a B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication, UNAM, 1977. Press correspondent in various countries since 1977.